Scott Guthrie: currently no plans for a 64-bit Silverlight

Microsoft currently has no plans for a 64-bit version of Silverlight 3. The …

On February 1, 2009, Microsoft was showcasing 444 Silverlight applications on Silverlight.net.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division, began talking about Silverlight 3 in November 2008. Last month he started again, probably because MIX09, which Guthrie will be keynoting, is coming up next month. Silverlight 3 Beta 1 is most likely going to released at the conference. Among the new features for the next version are media enhancements (including H.264 video support), graphics improvements (including 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration), and application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls).

That's what Guthrie has been saying for the last few months, but one thing he wasn't talking about was 64-bit support. When I asked him if there would be a 64-bit Silverlight 3 version, he gave me the following response via e-mail:

Right now our plan is to run SL in 32-bit mode (and not have a 64-bit native version). This is mostly because other browser plug-ins (and most browsers) don't support 64-bit yet. We are looking at adding native 64-bit support in the future though.

This is a real shame for the quickly growing number of users that are using 64-bit operating systems, because 64-bit browsers can't really take off until we get support from plug-ins like Java, Flash, and Silverlight. Personally, I was hoping that Microsoft would lead the pack and push competitors to support 64-bit browsers. Alas, it looks like that won't be happening any time soon, though Guthrie has said that this year Silverlight will be doing things beyond what Flash and Ajax can do.

Note: 64-bit operating systems also include 32-bit browsers that work just fine with all these web plug-ins.